Community Engagement Fellowship Projects

Peter Miller – Peninsula Emergency Response Training

Mission Statement: While teaching and instructing first aid to the surrounding community has remained at the forefront of this project’s mission, the greater goal to protect, save, and improve life within the peninsula through health training and education has taken many new forms through the endeavors of CERO as the host organization. Instruction classes within the community were largely placed on hold and several trainings of our own members were postponed, but CERO continued to meet, recruit new members, welcome in a new leadership team of nine officers, develop organizational structure, and learn and teach life saving skills. The addition of newly trained EMTs and several newly trained first-aid instructors continues to increase the ability of the community to respond to emergencies as well as share the knowledge with others. This fall, CERO grew in both ability and recognition as an organization within the CNU and Peninsula communities.

Avery Naperala – Urban Agriculture and Food Security in Newport News

Mission Statement: This project will explore how partnerships in the community will create opportunities to use urban agriculture to help to increase food security in the downtown Newport News community by creating better access to affordable, nutritious food in food deserts. Avery had a Ferguson Fellowship last year and will continue her work with the Newport News Green Foundation exploring the feasibility of an urban forest on one of their properties and the Parkview Baptist Church with their 2-acre community garden.

Lindsay Salmon – Give it UP Move out Recovery

Mission Statement: CNU generates almost 20% of our yearly waste when students move out of the residence halls in the late spring. This project will work to connect those usable materials to community partners who can give them a second life.

Davis Pillow – Clean Energy Sustainability: Implementation of SolSmart for the City of Newport News

Mission Statement: The City of Newport News is committed to becoming a SolSmart-designated community to advance the economic, social, and environmental benefits of clean energy. The goal of SolSmart is to increase the efficiency of local processes related to solar development, which may save our local government and community time and money.

Audrey White – Conscious Consumer

Mission Statement: Our Conscious Consumer Sustainability Fellow will work to connect our CNU community to lower impact products and services, highlighting local vendors wherever possible. They will use our social media platforms to provide reviews of personal care and household use products as well as help to expand the “Buy it Better” List of procurement-approved local and more sustainable vendors for CNU goods and services.

Brittany Branch – Confronting Educational Injustices in South Africa

Mission Statement: In both South Africa and the United States, there exists pervasive and debilitating social injustice in the education systems. I will travel to South Africa to directly confront these issues by interviewing those who have been directly impacted by the conditions of the education systems. This in coordination with literature reviews and analysis of existing data will allow me to develop a conclusive report with recommendations for moving toward a more tolerant, class and race inclusive, and accessible education system in both nations.

Nicolette DeFrank – Cage and Controlled: The Link between Animal Abuse and Domestic Violence

Mission Statement: The purpose of this project is to provide greater contextual knowledge on the relationship between domestic violence and animal abuse in battered women’s shelters in Hampton Roads community and the United States at large. By gathering qualitative and quantitative evidence from a variety of sources, we can more accurately recognize the link between domestic violence and animal abuse in the area, and gather information which may ultimately help to provide a holistic solution.

Malik Dickens – The Civil Discourse Initiative

Mission Statement: Educating and fostering the Christopher Newport University community with space, tools, and principles to engage in civil discourse and the expression of freedom of speech.

Spencer Koger – Creating Leadership in a World of Bright Leaders

Mission Statement: Our purpose is to create a stable foundation for young individuals to learn and grow about leadership. From history’s most significant enemies to its greatest allies, leadership has evolved and changed with our social reality. As young and inventive individuals seek to challenge every threshold so to do, we, by challenging young individuals to learn how to lead.

Peter Miller – Save a Life Peninsula Community Instruction Initiative

Mission Statement: This endeavor seeks to address a need for the instruction of lifesaving first-aid skills such as bleeding control, CPR, and AED use in the Hampton Roads Community while fostering a greater sense of community unity and active citizenship through the combining of efforts from all societal members to care for their fellow man. Additionally, this project will seek an expanded effect to combat violence, operating on the notion that with the knowledge to save a life comes with it the intentionality and responsibility of doing so. These endeavors will be meticulously documented and researched in an attempt to further persuade governments and policy makers of the vitality of this project and create a trailerable outcome for any community who wishes follow.

Avery Naperala – Increasing Access to Nutritious Foods in Newport News

Mission Statement: The goal of this project is to assess actual community needs related to the ability to access nutritious food, including fresh fruits and vegetables, and to devise a realistic and sustainable solution that incorporates green space and encourages residents to interact with their food production.